I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.

Saturday, May 31, 2014

Nasir Khan, May 31, 2014How can such crimes be prevented? It
seems there are no easy answers. On the one hand there is much adoration
and lip-service to traditions and family-values in tradition-bound
Indian and Pakistani societies. On the other hand in such
tradition-bound patriarchal societies, the status of women is one of
inequality and subordination. Women have no option than to obey the
commands of their male family-members and comply with their wishes. There
exists a vicious circle of traditions and misguided use of old
religious edicts to oppress and misuse women. No doubt, to seek
retribution and show our emotional outrage are our justified responses
to such events as has happened in India in this case and also in
Pakistan recently when a young girl was battered to death by her
relatives in the name of ‘family honour’ to justify such an abominable
barbaric killing. But the question remains: Can we
improve the condition of women in traditional societies without pointing
to the sources of oppression? In the name of old traditions every year
thousands of women are genitally mutilated, many are killed in the name
of ‘family honour’ and countless millions suffer physical torture and
oppression. That means the sources that lie in old traditions and the
misuse of religious teachings should be publicly discussed by the media.
Here comes the role of the enlightened members of society who
understand the problem and who can use their knowledge and skills to
devise strategies that can help us to spread the message amongst the
people and help us fight against these social ills.

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Two Teenage Girls Gang Raped, Murdered, and Left Hanging from Tree in Latest Gruesome Sexual Assault in India

Protestors rally after five-year-old girl was allegedly raped, tortured and kept in captivity for 40 hours in April 2013.

REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

India’s deeply troubling problem of sexual violence towards women
sunk to a new, gruesome low on Wednesday. Two teenage sisters in rural
northern India were abducted from fields near their home and gang raped
before being strangled by their attackers and then left hanging by
nooses from a mango tree. “The girls, who were 14 and 15, had gone into
the fields because there was no toilet in their home,” the Associated Press reports.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

FORUM-ASIA Statement: 27 May 2014The Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA), a
regional human rights group with 47 member organisation across 16
countries in Asia, registers its deep concern at the rapidly
deteriorating human rights situation in Thailand following the
imposition of martial law since 20 May 2014 and subsequently a military
coup on 22 May 2014. Increasing restrictions have been imposed on the
exercise and enjoyment of basic rights and freedoms while violations
continue unabated without any accountability or safeguard mechanisms put
in place by the military government.

In a time of deep political turmoil and uncertainty, the restrictions
on press freedom – through the initial silencing of TV stations and
channels, sweeping restrictions on print, broadcast and online media,
blocking of websites and threats to shut down social media – are
particularly worrying as people are denied access to crucial
information, critical analysis and the opportunity to discuss issues of
national importance. This is further exacerbated by the recent summons
and arrests of academics, journalists and other media practitioners who
continued to report on or speak out against the coup and for alternative
solution.

Friday, May 16, 2014

Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has won a landslide victory for Indian parliament election. BJP
is set to win in 283 seats, eight more than the required half way mark
in 543 member House. With its allies, the tally of National Democratic
Alliance (NDA) is expected to go up to 335.

Narendra Modi, the BJP’s leader, will be the next prime minister of India.

The Congress party, that has run India
for all but 13 years since independence, was set to crash to its worst
ever result after a decade in power. Congress was virtually decimated as
it bagged only 18 seats and was leading in 27 others. Party president
Sonia Gandhi and Vice President Rahul Gandhi accepted responsibility for
the defeat.

There was a record turnout in the
elections, with 66.38 percent of the 814 million eligible voters casting
ballots during several stages of the six-week ballot. Turnout in the
2009 elections was 58.13 percent.

Narendra Modi’s role in the infamous Gujarat Pogrom,
is still under legal scanner. The anti-minority carnage started
following the gruesome killing of 59 Hindus on 27th February, 2002 in a
train fire at Godhra. Modi’s alleged to have given free reign to rioters
without taking sufficient steps to prevent the massacre. The Gujarat
administration was accused by the opposition of taking insufficient
action against the violence, and even condoning it in some cases.

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Why
do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our name? Why do we
allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis”, as if the truth “never happened even while it was happening”.

Every year the American historian William Blum
publishes his “updated summary of the record of US foreign policy”
which shows that, since 1945, the US has tried to overthrow more than 50
governments, many of them democratically elected; grossly interfered in
elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30
countries; used chemical and biological weapons; and attempted to
assassinate foreign leaders.

In many cases Britain has been a collaborator. The degree of human
suffering, let alone criminality, is little acknowledged in the west,
despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications and
nominally most free journalism. That the most numerous victims of
terrorism – “our” terrorism – are Muslims, is unsayable. That extreme
jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of Anglo-American
policy (Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan) is suppressed. In April the US state department noted that, following Nato’s campaign in 2011, “Libya has become a terrorist safe haven“.

Monday, May 12, 2014

As the momentum of India’s nine-phase Lok Sabha election shifts in
favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s opponents, a new bunch of writers
and social scientists have risen to defend its Prime Ministerial
candidate Narendra Modi. Some of them see virtue and talent, indeed even
poetic genius, in a man who presided over the mass butchery of Muslims
in Gujarat. (One of them compares Mr Modi’s ghastly poetry with
Kabir’s!)

Yet others are shamelessly writing barely-disguised job applications
anticipating a Modi victory. They include former diplomats and
intelligence officers associated with the extreme-Right pro-Hindutva
think-tank Vivekananda International Foundation [1], and Arvind Panagaria, a US-based neoliberal economist, and on his behalf, his mentor Jagdish Bhagwati.

Panagaria—who holds a chair at Columbia University named after
(surprise, surprise!) Bhagwati—is lobbying for the post of chief
economic adviser to the government. What little claim this
undistinguished economist might have had to that post stands undermined
by his recently propounded “theory” that Indians are genetically
differently constituted from other human beings in that they are
predisposed to being shorter and smaller. So standard international
norms of measuring malnutrition or stunting by height-for-age and
weight-for-age ratios don’t apply to Indians.